January 23, 2007

The Migration to Google Blogger? Ongoing...

We've been posting regularly to the blog on louisgray.com for just over a year now, using Real Mac Software's RapidWeaver engine. As recounted a few times here, the application worked great initially, but has slogged down, no thanks to my frequent writing. After investigating a number of solutions, we finally settled on Google's Blogger engine, which will enable us to match a similar look and feel to what readers have grown accustomed, will enable Web-based posting at any time from any computer, and should handle the migration of RSS feeds without too many issues.

Yet, RapidWeaver continues to be my undoing. The application does not offer the ability to export to a standard format recognized by Google's Blogger or Six Apart's TypePad or WordPress. We looked everywhere. As a result, over the last few months, while maintaining the site here, we've been playing the copy/paste game of the more than 600 posts, including recreation of thousands and thousands of URL hyperlinks, to catch the Blogger site up to date. Every time we catch an archived movie on TiVo, we're copying and pasting, and adding the URL tags... over and over and over. It's enough to give me carpal tunnel - not that it's actually happened yet.

Starting with January 9, 2006, when the site debuted, we've migrated all posts through October 26, 2006, meaning we're "only" about three months behind. Once we close the gap, you'll know it, and I'll be very pleased. I won't be stuck in a proprietary application engine that stalls out my computer every time I post. I won't have to sit on stories while at the office as much. And as Google believes in standards in a big way, I can import/export out of Blogger if I ever get sick of them as well. It's sure to happen some day.

So, hang tight, and understand that we're working on moving us forward. To watch the new site's progress, or just to relive the old posts as if they were new again, go to the test site.